WinUAE help!
•
Page 2

Dirtbox wrote:
What's all this blarney about WHDload I've heard mentioned? I take it it's some kind of hard drive mahoojit, but is it required?

It's a non freeware designed to run on proper amiga. It allows the installation of games on to the HD which aren't "supposed" to be installed on the HD.

I had a go with it and found in impenetrable. And I had an A500 back in the day.

Seeing you're just storing ADFs on your PCs harddrive anyway, there's probably not much benefit installing them again on a virtual HD within the emulator, as it's just a convenience thing really.

God....

I might have another go... I did get as far as getting WHDload working a while ago.
But that involved installing workbench and then some libraries and the WHDload, only for it to refuse to work with many games unless you registered it.

Using adf files is so much less of a headache unless you plan to play lots of games.

Though I do have to say Amikit is rather a crazy addition which I might have another play with some time.

WHDLoad is a program for Workbench. To use it on WinUAE would mean making a configuration where you're emulating an Amiga with a hard-drive, and have it boot from the hard-drive on startup (which is how it would have worked on an actual Amiga if you had a HDD). Then you'd install WHDLoad, and then use it to install games to the emulated Amiga Hard-drive.

WHDLoad is only *really* that useful if you're using real hardware, then it installs certain games / disk images to the hard drive and allows them to be booted from Workbench, and usually to quit out cleanly back to Workbench (not many Amiga games did this). Also means the games get fixed for incompatibilities with later chipsets.

In other words: if you're emulating, you don't need to bother most of the time.

As for the borders, it sounds like you'll need to put on pixel doubling when needed; the Amiga's graphics modes were a *LOT* more flexible than most other machines so WinUAE usually renders a full 640x480 screen with whatever the Amiga screenmode is plonked in the middle. If you put pixel doubling (at least, I think that's the name!) then it'll do exactly what it says on the tin and blow the screen up if the Amiga is doing a low-res mode.

No dudes, WHDLoad is great for emulation purposes if you spend some time emulating Amigas. Many games benefit from being installed on an HD and I think I remember a few games that required to be HD installed and still used WHDLoad.
It's not such a big deal to set up a virtual HD and once you do you can play the 3D games on the monster of an Amiga that you could never afford back then. Also, just running a newer version of Workbench with millions of colors, high resolution and stuff is cool in itself. There's an emulator for the late Amiga graphics cards too, that you run with WinUAE, which lets you play some pretty advanced 3D games.

Make a copy of your .config file and put it in a safe place. There should be an option to make a new, default configuration, first thing you'll need to do is put the pathway in for the boot ROM you're using, see what happens when you boot a game using that.

If it works, adjust the options one by one, booting a game each time you make a change so you know what to change back if your new config breaks something.

For best compatibility, Kickstart 1.3 and 512K of chip memory with the OCS chip set. It's best to have separate configs for fast memory, one with 512K, one with none, and a separate config for playing Amiga 1200 games.